It is evening as my friend and I drive down the east coast of Hawai’i toward Kalapana. The town itself hardly exists anymore. Lava from Kilauea – flowing out of nearby Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park – has just about buried the community.

But like the hundreds driving before and after us, we have come to watch that lava continue its destructive creation, producing more land at the edge of the island even as it devastates nearly every living thing before it.

This is the closest I may ever come to believing in miracles. And not just because the lady beside me has agreed to one more national park jaunt. The miracle is the privilege of witnessing the earth at its most dynamic, and it makes Hawai’i Volcanoes the greatest national park in our firmament. The only national park that grows of its own accord.

We have borrowed flashlights from our bed & breakfast in Volcano Village and soon join the others as we thread our way on foot across the bumpy asphalt of past lava flows. “I’m going to fall down here,” I warn my companion, “so don’t get upset.”

But I am hobbling with others in worse condition than I am: A young man swinging in a cast and on crutches; an old lady deliberately moving forward on two canes, attentive grandchildren at her side. It is hard to not think we are dedicated pilgrims to the shrine, and my companion says it reminds her of the candlelight processions to the graveyards in her native Poland.

Not long after we arrive at the viewing site, safely distant from where the lava explodes as it hits the sea, the sun slips behind the plume of Kilauea on the distant hill. Little beads of incandescence wink at the edge of the land. This is already more gratification than I expected: I have come to see live and moving lava, and I am satisfied.

But as the sun fully sets and darkness falls, the black tongue of lava cracks like an egg. Orange and yellow streams, thick as albumen, descend from first one crack and then another, until the entire shell collapses and the lava spills forward in a seemingly endless surge. The crowd ooohhs and aaahhhs like it’s fireworks. It is fireworks.

“Ha,” my friend laughs as we make our way back to the car. “You kept saying you were going to fall.” I believe I was upheld by my own light breathlessness.

But I am not done with the national park. For the next three cold and rainy dawns and dusks, I drive alone out into the park itself, to the viewing deck above the huge Halema’uma’u Crater, where a vent has recently opened and spills a cloud of steam and ash. I join two or three photographers in the chilly air, and we watch the glowing vent. We are all waiting for the next moment, and then the next.

“I want to see her really let go,” one of the photographers says.

“It could be the last thing you ever see,” I say, confident in his response: “I want that to be the last thing I ever see.”

We are not destroyed, not even treated to a burp of actual lava, but on the dawn of the day I have to fly off the island, there is this: “Shhh,” the photographers whisper as I come forward. “Listen.”

There is a continuous rumble, like a distant surf, and then – occasionally – a knocking sound like a brick falling down a chimney, or a single pin falling in a subterranean bowling alley. Beneath our feet, the interior of the vent is collapsing, piece by piece.

Dawn comes without rain and sets the plume of steam alight. Fire above; fire below. Fire inside my unmiraculous soul.